Art and Gentrification in the Changing
Neoliberal Landscape
Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various
disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving
relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated
discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing
phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods.
Since the 1980s, art and artists’ roles in gentrification have been at the forefront of
urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and
new urban planning. In these accounts, the artists have been noted to contribute at all
stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it
themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban spaces illustrates
the constant negotiation between power and resistance. And there is a growing need
to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The
chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of
the neoliberal city not only allows uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment
strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies,
cultural studies, human geography, social anthropology, and urban studies as well as
contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.
Tijen Tunalı is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Research Fellow at Aarhus
Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) Aarhus University, Denmark.
Cover image: Exterior view of the Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin, a derelict building
which housed a contemporary art squat and became a casualty of gentrification in
2012. Image courtesy of www.freeimages.co.uk.
Routledge Research in Art and Politics
Routledge Research in Art and Politics is a new series focusing on politics and government
as examined by scholars working in the fields of art history and visual studies. Proposals
for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed.
Migration, Diversity and the Arts
The Postmigrant Condition
Moritz Schramm, Sten Pultz Moslund and Anne Ring Petersen
Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times
The Revolution Will Be Live
Kristina Olson and Erec J. Schruers
Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art
Marta Filipová
Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism
Anthony White
WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context
A New Deal for Design
Cory Pillen
The Political Portrait
Leadership, Image and Power
Edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone
Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis
Aesthetic Resilience
Edited by Eliza Steinbock, Bram Ieven, and Marijke de Valck
Terrorism and the Arts
Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production
Edited by Jonathan Harris
Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape
Edited by Tijen Tunali
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Art-and-Politics/book-series/RRAP
Art and Gentrification in
the Changing Neoliberal
Landscape
Edited by
Tijen Tunalı
First published 2021
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Tijen Tunalı to be identified as the author of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tunali, Tijen, editor.
Title: Art and gentrification in the changing neoliberal landscape / edited by
Tijen Tunali.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020054570 (print) | LCCN 2020054571 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367521479 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003056720 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art and cities. | Gentrification. | Neoliberalism‐‐Social aspects.
Classification: LCC N72.C58 A785 2021 (print) | LCC N72.C58 (ebook) | DDC
701/.03‐‐dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054570
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054571
ISBN: 978-0-367-52147-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-52149-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05672-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
List of Contributors
Introduction: The Dialectic Role of Art in Late Neoliberal
Urbanism
vii
ix
x
xi
1
TIJE N TUNAL I
PART I
Art’s Conflicting Relationship to Gentrification in the Twenty-First
Century
1
Gentrification and the Critique of the Contemporary Urban
Dream-World
19
21
L UKE CARRO L L
2
Proximal Disruptions: Artists, Arts-Led Urban Regeneration
and Gentrification in Oakland, California
39
ROB IN B AL L I G E R
3
Arts, Culture and Neoliberalism: Instrumentalization and
Resistance in the Case of Marseille
57
M ATHIL DE VIG N A U A N D A L E X A N D R E G R O NDEAU
PART II
Alternative Voices, Visualities and Performances Against
Gentrification
4
A Listening Against Gentrification: Ultra-Red in Boyle Heights
and Elephant & Castle
S US ANA JIM E N E Z - C A R M O N A
75
77
vi Contents
5
Representing the Anti-Gentrification Resistance: The Role of
Two Artists in a Retail Market in London
91
M ARIE -PIE R R E VI N C E N T
6
Enacting the “Right to the Creative City” in Berlin
108
RAB E A B E RF E L D E
PART III
Community Building in the Gentrified Urban Space
7
The Urban Art Mapping Project: Mapping Art, Narrative and
Community in St. Paul, Minnesota
125
127
HE ATHE R SHI R E Y , D A VI D TO D D L A W R E N CE, AND PAUL LORAH
8
Indigenous Cultural Resurgence, Hotel Murals and
Neocolonial Urbanism
140
MICHE L L E VE I TC H
9
“Mapping the Old City”: Street Art, Urban Resistance and
Community Building in Nicosia, Cyprus, 2014–2018
162
PANOS L E VE N TI S
Index
176
Figures
1.1
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
5.1
5.2
5.3
6.1
7.1
7.2
7.3
The aestheticization of labor, 2019. Photograph. Shoreditch.
©Luke Carroll
Disinvestment at 32nd Street and San Pablo Ave., West Oakland.
March 8, 2016. Photograph: Robin Balliger
Still image from “The Guillotine” music video by The Coup, 2012
“Each 1 Teach 1” live style writing at First Friday. March 1, 2013.
Photograph: Robin Balliger
Protesting factory farms at First Friday, Oakland. May 3, 2019.
Photograph: Robin Balliger
Location of the four study cases analyzed in Marseille, 2020.
©Mathilde Vignau
Example of Graffiti in Le Panier, 2016. Marseille. ©Mathilde
Vignau
Example of frescos in Le Panier, 2016. Marseille. ©Mathilde Vignau
Using street art to denounce the “high treason” of the municipality
in La Plaine, 2016. Marseille. ©Mathilde Vignau
Future Hackney. Untitled, 2019. Photograph. Ridley Road Market.
©Donna Travis
Support Black Businesses. Untitled, 2019. Photograph. Ridley Road
Market. ©Donna Travis
Future Hackney. Hands off, 2019. Photograph. Ridley Road
Market. ©Donna Travis
Martin Baier, Doch Kunst (Yet Art), 2017
Our study area is located in the Midway Neighborhood in St. Paul,
Minnesota. (a) Minnesota is part of the “North Coast” bordering both
Canada and Lake Superior. (b) The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St.
Paul are located at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi
rivers. (c) The Midway Neighborhood is often overlooked—it
developed later than the downtown cores and is often seen as an
area to pass through. (d) The heat map displays urban development
patterns as of 1900, depicting the neighborhood’s central location, as
well as its peripheral role. ©Paul Lorah
Lori Greene, Berbere, 2015. Mosaic. St. Paul, Minnesota. ©Lori
Greene
Greta McLain, Braided, Acrylic on poly tab canvas on brick; mosaic.
2015. St. Paul, Minnesota. ©Greta McLain
31
43
47
50
52
60
66
67
69
93
99
100
118
128
134
135
viii
Figures
8.1 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree), Richard Tetrault, Eric Parnell (Haida),
Richard Shorty (Northern Tutchone), Haisla Collins (Tsimshian,
Celtic), Sharifah Marsden (Anishinaabe) and Nicola Campbell
(Interior Salish, Métis), Through the Eye of the Raven, 2010. Wall
mural, Orwell Hotel, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. Video
still from Through the Eye of the Raven (2010), produced by
Vancouver Native Housing Society and Joseph MacLean/Numedia
Group. ©Dave Eddy, Orwell Hotel and Vancouver Native Housing
Society
8.2 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree), Richard Tetrault, Eric Parnell (Haida),
Richard Shorty (Northern Tutchone), Haisla Collins (Tsimshian,
Celtic), Sharifah Marsden (Anishinaabe) and Nicola Campbell
(Interior Salish, Métis), Through the Eye of the Raven, 2010. Wall
mural, Orwell Hotel, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. Video
still from Through the Eye of the Raven (2010), produced by
Vancouver Native Housing Society and Joseph MacLean/Numedia
Group. ©Dave Eddy, Orwell Hotel and Vancouver Native Housing
Society
8.3 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree) and Portico Design, Forest Spirits Suite
(Room 508), 2013. Skwachàys Lodge and Residence, Downtown
Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. Photographer Craig Minielly/Aura
Photographics. ©Craig Minielly, Dave Eddy, Skwachàys Lodge and
Vancouver Native Housing Society
8.4 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree), Nancy A. Luis (Cree, Iroquois, Métis)
and Portico Design, Northern Light Suite (Room 609), 2013.
Skwachàys Lodge and Residence, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver,
Canada. Photographer Craig Minielly/Aura Photographics. ©Craig
Minielly, Dave Eddy, Skwachàys Lodge and Vancouver Native
Housing Society
9.1 Locations of “Mapping the Old City” works in Walled Nicosia.
©Panos Leventis
9.2 The 15 works of “Mapping the Old City” numbered chronologically
and grouped in three geographic clusters. ©Panos Leventis
9.3 “Mapping the Old City” work #1, Aristophanous Street,
April 2014. ©Panos Leventis
9.4 “Mapping the Old City” work #4, Trikoupi Street, August 2016.
©Panos Leventis
9.5 “Mapping the Old City” work #2, Achilleos Street, April 2016.
©Panos Leventis
149
150
155
156
164
166
168
169
171
Acknowledgments
This book project emerged from two academic gatherings. One is the panel I organized
at Art History Association’s (AHH) annual meeting “Art and Gentrification in the
Changing Neoliberal Landscape” on April 4–6, 2019, in Brighton, UK. I am grateful to
the presenters Luke Caroll, Amy Melia, Michelle Veitch, Marlous Van Boldrik, Justin
Burns, Nicola Guy, Bill Balaskas and Kirsten Lloyd who, with their rigorous input and
challenging discussions, inspired me to produce this book. The other conference, which
enabled me to be exposed to the works of the authors Mathilde Vignau, Marie-Pierre
Vincent, David Todd Lawrence, Paul Lorah, Heather Shirey and Panos Leventis, was
“Rebel Streets: Urban Space, Art and Social Movements.” I co-convened that conference
with Gülçin Erdi at CITERES (CIté, TERritoires, Environnement et Sociétés) laboratory
at the University of Tours in France. I give my thanks to Dr. Erdi for her collaboration in
the organization and funding of the conference and CITERES director Nora Semmoud
for her strong support to realize this large international gathering and my exhibition that
accompanied it. I would like to thank Muriel Hourlier for her aid in digitalizing this
conference and Adeline Vioux for her contribution in designing all the print media.
I thank Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH), CITERES and LE STUDIUM Institute
for Advanced Studies Val de Loire for the funding of the conference and my postdoctoral
research at the University of Tours that both academic organizations stemmed from.
I wish to thank the contributors to this book. Most of them I met in the two conferences
and a few of them I have had the pressure to get to know through email correspondences. I
especially thank them for showing the utmost professionalism during all stages of this book
project. I am sure our paths will cross in other academic collaborations and endeavors.
I am grateful to Routledge’s Art History and Visual Studies editor Isabella Vitti for
approaching me with the publication proposal and for her understanding that has
pushed this book forward in the right direction in a record amount of time. I owe
thanks to Katie Armstrong for all her help in the administrative and other official
matters during the contract and production phases of this volume. I also thank the
anonymous peer-reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions that have
given me a smoother path to walk on.
For the financial support of this project, I thank the Aarhus Institute of Advanced
Studies for their generous research fellowship based on the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkłodowskaCurie grant agreement No 754513 and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.
Finally, I extend sincere gratitude to the late Prof. David L. Craven for being the
architect of my academic growth.
About the Editor
Tijen Tunalı is an academic, artist and curator. Her doctoral dissertation focused on
the dialectical relationship of contemporary art and aesthetics to neoliberal
globalization. It was supported by various fellowships from the institutions
including the Latin American Studies Institute at the University of New Mexico,
the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Terra Foundation, Tinker Foundation and Phyllis
Muth Foundation. Her postdoctoral researches “Art and the City: Urban Space Art
and Social Movements” and “Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal
Landscape” were funded by LE STUDIUM/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship of
Val de Loire Institute of Advanced Studies in France and Aarhus Institute of
Advanced Studies COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship in Denmark,
respectively. She has curated exhibitions in four continents and actively engaged in
art biennials, such as the Bienal de la Habana 2009 and the Istanbul Biennial 2013.
Most recently, she curated the exhibition “The Street Art of the Oaxaca Rebellion of
2006” in Pole des Arts Urbains/pOlau, Tours, France in May-June 2018. Tijen is the
founder and organizer of “Art and the City: Urban Space, Art and Social Change” –the
international conference series featuring the latest work and current thinking of artists,
activists and researchers working on the intersection of urban art and resistance.
Her writing appeared in many edited volumes and in ASAP Journal, Journal of
Urban Cultural Studies, and Journal of Visual Art among others. With Prof. Brian
Winkenweder, she is currently working on the volume Routledge Companion to
Marxist Art History, editing the contributions of 40 Marxist scholars.
Contributors
Alexandre Grondeau is an assistant professor at Aix-Marseille University. He has a
PhD in geography (thesis defended at Parix X Nanterre). He was previously an
associate research professor at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-enYvelines. After having been a member of the Laboratory of Urban Geography of
Nanterre, then of C3ED, he joined the laboratory TELEMME where he specializes
in critical geography, through urban and economic approaches regarding
territories of innovation and creativity. His researches notably focus on India,
the United States and France. Dr. Grondeau regularly publishes scientific articles in
national and international journals. He is the coauthor, with Guy Burgel, of Urban
Geography published by Hachette Supérieur.
David Todd Lawrence is an associate professor of English at the University of
St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches African-American literature
and culture, folklore studies and cultural studies.
Heather Shirey is a professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas. Her
teaching and research focus on race and identity, migrations and diasporas, and
street art and its communities.Together, Lawrence, Lorah and Shirey direct the
Urban Art Mapping research team. Urban Art Mapping is a multidisciplinary,
multiracial group of faculty and students from the College of Arts and Sciences at the
University of St. Thomas. Student researchers include Martin Beck, Tiaryn Daniels,
Summer Erickson, Ben Schroeder, Alice Ready, Emma Rinn, Hannah Shogren-Smith
and Chioma Uwagwu. The group created and manages two street art archives: the
COVID-19 Street Art database (https://covid19streetart.omeka.net) and the George
Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database (https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net).
Luke Carroll is a PhD student at the University of York. His PhD thesis “London and
the Dreamworld of Gentrification” seeks to explore the role played by desire,
fantasy, and aesthetics, in producing gentrification, and gentrifiers, in
contemporary London, specifically, along the route of the A10, which stretches
from the City of London to Tottenham. He has presented his work at Université
Paris Nanterre’s “Political Culture and Political Movements in the Neoliberal
City,” “Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neo-Liberal Urban Landscape” for
the Association of Art History, and the Political Theory Symposium at the
University of York. Luke’s broader research interests include Critical Theory,
Commodity Aesthetics, Urban Sociology and the Philosophy of Walter Benjamin.
xii Contributors
Marie-Pierre Vincent is a former student at the ENS Cachan, an agrégation holder in
English, and currently a PhD candidate, in British civilization. She studies antigentrification resistance in Hoxton/Shoreditch in London (2008–2019) at
Sorbonne Université (Lettres) and within HDEA research team. After a threeyear doctoral contract at Sorbonne Université when she taught British and
American history to students of English, she joined Paris 1/Panthéon-Sorbonne
as a teaching assistant in English for management students. She is also the author
of an article in a French journal on a comparative case study on the cultural and
social diversity between two cultural centers (le Centquatre in Paris and Rich Mix
in London).
Mathilde Vignau earned her PhD in geography in October 2019 at Aix-Marseille
Université and within TELEMME laboratory with the thesis “Towards a Creative
Geography: Impacts of Cultural and Creative Places, Activities, and Events on the
PACA Region’s Development”. For five years, she was a teaching assistant in
geography at Aix-Marseille Université. In August 2020, she joined the ESPI Group
in Marseille as an associate professor in geography and urbanism. She is also a
researcher at the ESPI2R laboratory. She is focused on urban and economic
geography as well as territorial creativity, urban neoliberalism and radical
geography.
Michelle Veitch is an associate professor in art history at Humanities Department,
Mount Royal University, Calgary. She specializes in contemporary Canadian art
with a focus on site-specific practices and urbanization. Her research analyzes
political aesthetics in public city space borrowing from geography studies and
critical art discourse. Veitch has published articles in the journals Topia and
International Journal of Canadian Studies and Racar. She has also coauthored
publications, including an article for the journal, Fuse and an essay in the book,
Global Indigenous Media (Duke University Press). In addition, she has presented
conference papers for the Association of Art History (UK), the University Art
Association of Canada, the College Art Association (US), the University of Tours
(France), and the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. She is currently
completing a scholarly book on urban art hotels and bohemian spaces in Canada
from the 1980s to the present under contract with McGill Queen’s University
Press.
Panos Leventis is a professor at the Hammons School of Architecture of Drury
University in Springfield, Missouri. He served as Director of the Drury Center in
Greece, and taught at the USC Architecture Program in Como, at McGill’s
School of Architecture in Montréal, and at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia.
Panos has lectured and participated in design reviews at the University of
Michigan, the Pratt Institute, the University of New Mexico, the State University
of New York at Albany, California State University in San Luis Obispo, Missouri
State University, Mid-Sweden University, the University of Patras in Greece, the
American College of Greece and the four accredited Schools of Architecture in
Cyprus. He has been practicing as a licensed Architect in Cyprus, with built
projects and awarded entries in national and international Architectural
competitions. Panos’ research engages the past, present and future of
Contributors xiii
Mediterranean cities. Departing from his dissertation, he authored Twelve Times
in Nicosia. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1192–1570: Architecture, Topography and Urban
Experience in a Diversified Capital City, published by the Cyprus Research
Center. He has since been publishing on the topography of late medieval and
renaissance cities in the eastern Mediterranean. Panos has additionally been
researching socio-urban upheavals in the context of crisis, focusing on graffiti,
street art and urban resistance movements as understood via the lens of public
space and participatory urban processes. He has published and lectured on this
work in Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Sweden and the United
States.
Paul Lorah is an associate professor of Geography at the University of St. Thomas.
His work focuses on the relationship between conservation, public lands and local
economies, landscape analysis, and the geography of street art.
Rabea Berfelde is a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London (Department
of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies). In general, her work takes an
interdisciplinary approach and draws on critical and political theory to analyze the
impact of financialization on everyday life in urban environments. Her PhD “In the
Urban Factory. The Reconfiguration of Labour and Urban Space in Berlin”
departs from the claim that urban space has been as fundamentally transformed by
deindustrialization and neoliberalization, as has the nature of work. Combining
fieldwork with philosophical and geographical analysis, she researches the
reconfiguration of both labor relations and urban places of production and
reproduction in Berlin. She has written and presented work on urban social
movements, the financialization of housing, autonomous cultural production,
feminist class politics and labor under platform capitalism. Rabea teaches seminars
on global cultural politics, biopolitics and feminist critiques of capitalism at
universities in both London and Berlin. Rabea is based in Berlin where she is
involved in the Right to the city movements.
Robin Balliger is an associate professor and chair of “Art, Place, and Public Studies”
and Liberal Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. She earned her PhD in
anthropology at Stanford University and her research focuses on expressive culture
in the context of neoliberal social and spatial transformations. Balliger’s current
project is on the City of Oakland, California, particularly on arts, culture and
racial politics in the context of urban restructuring. Dr. Balliger previously
conducted extensive research in Trinidad on popular music, media expansion
and identity formation in national/transnational space. She earned the Textor
Award for Outstanding Anthropological Creativity, and she has received
fellowships from Fulbright, MacArthur Foundation, National Science
Foundation, Mellon Foundation and Wenner Gren. Her publications appear in
The Global Resistance Reader, Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a
Transnational Festival, and Media Fields Journal, and Race, Poverty, and the
Environment. Prior to attending graduate school, Dr. Balliger was a musician and
activist in San Francisco. She cofounded Komotion International, a legendary artist
collective, gallery and performance space that exemplified the radical politics and
creativity of San Francisco’s Mission District. Website: https://robinballiger.com.
xiv
Contributors
Susana Jiménez-Carmona is a graduate in philosophy (UNED, Spain) and has PhD in
humanities and culture (Universitat de Girona, Spain). Musician and sound artist,
she is a professor of “ethics and aesthetics of art sound” and “social implications
of sound art” in the Online Master of Sound Art at the Universitat de Barcelona.
She was the promoter and coordinator of El paseo de Jane in Madrid
(2010–2016), participatory initiative inspired by Jane Jacobs. Between 2015 and
2019, she was part of Cuidadoras de sonidos—a project of sound art and activism
about the city that sounds and that we listen to. She is currently collaborating with
the project “Ecrire en commun(s). Arts, écologies transitions” of MUSIDANSE
(Paris 8). She has published El paseo de Jane. Tejiendo redes a pie de calle (Madrid:
Modernito Books, 2016) and Guía de cómo hacer un paseo de Jane (Madrid:
Continta me tienes, 2017). She has collaborated to various books, including such
as Musicología en el siglo XXI: nuevos retos, nuevos enfoques (Madrid: SEDEM,
2018), Vacío, sustracción, silencio (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2017), Imaginario al
andar (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: TEA, 2017), and El segundo Heidegger: ecología,
arte y teología (Madrid: Editorial Dykinson, 2012). She has also published in
journals such as SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound
Experience, Boletín de arte, Sonograma Magazine, Revista Arquitectura (COAM),
AusArt Journal for Research, Panambí, revista de investigaciones artísticas, and
HUM736 Papeles de cultura contemporánea.
Introduction: The Dialectic Role of Art
in Late Neoliberal Urbanism
Tijen Tunalı
Much has been written about how cities are central to the spatial development of
neoliberalism, where the macro-politics of globalizing economies make and unmake
landscapes and architectures within which the micro-politics of many millions of
people’s day-to-day existences are lived out (Harvey 1978, 1990, 2012; Lefebvre 1974,
2000, 2003; Sennett 1994; Tonkiss 2005). A number of researchers have pointed out
the contradictory nature of neoliberal urbanism, for instance, how it advocates for the
development of innovative urban forms while building suburban enclaves, and how it
calls for participatory communities and an egalitarian social vision but, at the same
time, redesigns the urban space for elite consumers (Davis 1993; Dicks 2004; Fainstein
2010; Harvey 1989, 2012; Ley 1996; Low and Smith 2006; Smith 1996, 2002;
Smyth 1994). Concurrently, urban art has long been discussed for toning down urban
anxieties, boosting the economic environment of postindustrial cities, energizing
communities and neighborhoods and enforcing policies for new urban planning
(Guano 2020; Ley 2003; Mathews 2010; Zukin, 1987, 1995). As a response to this
economic, political and aesthetic urban experience, a growing urban resistance and its
aesthetic premises have become visible features of urban life.
Art in the urban space engages the masses through creativity, originality and beauty
and presents alternative forms of sociality. As such, art becomes an arena where the
creative individual and community come together in a shared space for a
recomposition of the shared sensorium. Yet, art enters the culture of the economy as
soon as it establishes this social relation with the public. Therefore, art—as a part of
both social and aesthetic power—has been a good resource for local governments to
market their respective cities to real-estate investors, to corporate businesses
seeking good public relations and to cultural tourists who contribute to the image of
the global city. In the cities, attractive corporate-sponsored street art completes the
pleasure of freshly brewed latte, while the fusion restaurants and art galleries compete
for empty lots. Our senses and sensibilities in our daily life are more and more
determined by the urban elite, namely urban planners, designers, policy-makers and
technocrats. At present, from barbershops to restaurants, from hotel owners to music
club proprietors, the citadins (urban dwellers), who take part in the commercial
activities in the city, understand that art is a part of the “coolness” that makes the city
an attractive tourist destination and a hotspot for young, middle-class professionals.
The political projection of this development is recognized as hegemony over the
sensorium of the urban space and thus everyday urban life (Markin 2013).
Art has long been discussed as a factor for boosting the economic environment of
postindustrial cities (Markusen and Schrock 2006), utilizing and normalizing the
2 Tijen Tunalı
neoliberal urban planning (Guinard and Margier 2018; Mathews 2010) and
contributing to gentrification and displacement (Cameron and Coaffee, 2005; Ley
2003; Rich 2019; Zukin, 1987, 1996). On the other hand, a number of research
related to the social role of art emphasizes the therapeutic, unitary or reconciliatory
attributes of art—arguing about art’s role to ease tensions between communities and
city authorities (Bishop 2012; Burton, Jackson and Willsdon 2016). Nevertheless,
such perspectives often do not take into account the multifaceted relationships of art
to neoliberal urbanization as well as visible, corporal and embodied aesthetic
experience in the urban space. The result is the marginalization of art’s role in the
radical creation of common and shared spaces for socialization, mobilization and
political action in the cities. In the wake of massive urban movements, uprisings and
revolts targeting neoliberalism all around the world, there has been a growing interest
to understand the social contextualization of art in the urban public realm. Currently,
there is a pressing need to challenge the dominant arguments that reduce the complex
and contradictory role of art to a straightforward phenomenon in a continuously
evolving neoliberal urban landscape. The major contribution that this book intends
to make is shifting the focus from both the utopian and dystopian visions of
neoliberal urbanism and the malevolent and passive role of art in it to a view that
recognizes art’s capacities of resistance agonism, contestation and re-appropriation in
the urban space.
In tandem with the neoliberal critique, there are compelling intellectual, social as
well as artistic movements eager to reclaim equal access to urban space and resources
for all urban inhabitants. The urban struggle based on the “right to the city,”
democratic political participation and resistance to neoliberalism have evolved from
claiming and redefining substantive rights of citizens to reproducing and
re-appropriating the urban space and empowering dissenters as city dwellers (Harvey
2012; Irazábal 2008; Mayer 2009; Merrifield 2014; Purcell 2004). The city’s parks,
streets and squares have been the central platforms for elevating these struggles in
both the political and aesthetic realm. Notably, art in the rebel streets has performed
in both the political constellations of local struggles and the grassroots politics of the
urban social movements. For example, street art played an essential role during the
Egyptian and Tunisian revolution (Abaza 2016), Spanish Indignados (RamírezBlanco 2018), Greek Aganaktismenoi movement (Tsilimpoudini 2016) and the Gezi
Uprising (Tunalı 2018). Recently, the Black Lives Matter Movement leaves its mark
in the urban space with street murals across the United States. Inspired by the
urban social movements and other urban struggles emerging from the continuing
politico-aesthetic urgencies, this book aspires to show that the aesthetic
reconfiguration of the neoliberal city not only allows for a hegemonic restructuring of
the urban environment but also facilitates the growth of counter-hegemonic
aesthetic resistance.
Regarding gentrification as a continuing and evolving process of neoliberal urban
planning, the authors discuss the complexities of aesthetic disposition in the
gentrified urban environment by analyzing the relations of art to both
cultural capital and bottom-up resistance in the city. The specific aim of the book is
twofold: (1) to rethink the changing and dialectic roles of art and artists in
urbanism that put the interests of capital over the interests of ordinary
inhabitants; (2) to reveal the potential of urban aesthetics in the formation of the
agonistic public experience that
Introduction
3
heralds a democratic political culture in the urban space. We seek to elaborate
an intersectional framework that examines “the right to the city” while offering a
theoretical and visual analysis of the aesthetic formations that are positive resources
for political culture to become visible and channel subjective dynamics into political
participation and empowerment. Weaving together extensive social science
findings—in urban sociology, human geography and cultural anthropology—with art
research and theory, we hope to contribute to the analysis of gentrification in neoliberal urbanism from the perspective of artistic resistance. We do that with regard to
the critique of neoliberalism, the urban agenda of neoliberal policy elites and
widening class inequality in the cities.
Neoliberalism had its heyday from 1989 until 2008, when the global economic crisis
began with Wall Street’s fourth-largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers, was going
bankrupt. The core of neoliberal philosophy involves liberating private enterprises from
any restrictions and regulations imposed by states, and it has a pronounced preference
for economic freedom over political freedom (Friedman and Rose 1980, 21). In the first
instance, neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices proposing that human
well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and
skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights,
free markets and free trade. Postwar economic developments witnessed the rise of the
welfare state, with the distribution of state wealth across education, health and social
security funds, but the neoliberal policies of the 1980s shrunk those funds in favor of
new markets and international treaties. The state in the neoliberal system consists of the
military, defense, police and legal structures and secures private property rights and
guarantees—by force if need be—the proper functioning of markets. This ensures the
quality and integrity of capital and not the citizens (Harvey 2006, 2). Infamously, David
Harvey, as well as many other neo-Marxist scholars, have argued that neoliberalism
arose to restore class power—the power that was threatened by the collapse of the
Keynesian approach to managing capitalist accumulation based on social democratic
systems and the Bretton Woods system, which had regulated international relations
(Harvey 2005, 11–25).
Neoliberal policies lead to the predominance of competition as a way of managing
urban and rural spaces—in contrast to the principles of redistribution that were upheld
in earlier eras—eras resulting in the transfer of many functions that were previously in
the hands of the state to nonstate and quasi-state bodies—such as corporations and
nongovernmental organizations—to respond to the needs of the citadins (Fawaz 2009).
This new “liberal” regime of political-economic governance has enveloped cities in an
ever-growing market-dominated power. Especially large cities have become increasingly
important laboratories for a variety of neoliberal urban policy experiments and
neoliberal urbanization has involved the creation of common spaces that guarantee the
conditions for the production and reproduction of free-flowing capital.
Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), criticized
twentieth-century liberals for betraying freedom by viewing welfare and equality as
either prerequisites for or alternatives to freedom (Friedman 1962). In The Road to
Serfdom, published first in 1944, Friedman’s mentor Friedrich Hayek admonishes
that government interventions and restrictions on the markets would lead to the loss
of freedom in economic as well as political life, and therefore the state should
concentrate only on tasks that create safety nets for neoliberal markets (Hayek 1994,
42–45). For Hayek, market freedom is essential for the capitalist market to expand
4 Tijen Tunalı
endlessly: “Parties in the market should be free to buy and sell at any price, so long as
they can find a partner to the transaction—free to produce, buy and sell anything that
can be produced or sold at all” (Hayek 1994, 42). As much as this concept of freedom
sounds like individual autonomy and self-determination, it refers only to the
consumer’s buying capacity. As long as the consumer has enough money to make
purchases, they can engage in any sort of “free” transaction. In his book Unequal
Freedoms, John McMurtry notes:
This measure of consumer freedom entails an unlimited inequality of freedom.
The more money one has, the more freedom one is entitled to, from none at all to
limitless rights to consume. This is the ground of individual freedom of citizens
with its strong claims of equality of opportunity for all the same time. These
contradictions do not detain market believers, for they know that the market
confers on them the unlimited freedom to choose, to have, and to enjoy consumer
goods the more money they have.
(McMurtry 1998, 166–167)
In this value system, our rights to partake in society depend on having “more” economic power that grants us the right to “freely” partake in the market system as
consumers. The key here is the technique of transfer from citizen to consumer. What
this concept of freedom does is to make individuals and communities subservient to
their commodity value. In neoliberal logic, “free” societies should be exposed to political processes as little as possible and much is to be left to the “free” market, where
individuals “freely” partake. With that, democratic life altogether changes its meaning.
David Harvey is renowned for his work to establish neoliberalism as a system of deceit.
His work redirects our perspective to recognize what appears to be about “freedom” is,
in fact, “anti-democratic,” and what seems to be promoting equality instead restores
and entrenches class power (Harvey 2006, 157–158). For example, what Harvey refers
to as “conservative political reforms” is the shift from democratic society to a new type
of neoliberal society, where the rulers reinforce counter-revolution through war and
fascist repression, dead-end reformism of elections and control of grassroots action and
civil society with the force of corporate initiatives (Harvey 2005, 47). In the same vein,
Dag Einar Thorsen and Amund Lie observe that:
… if the democratic process slows down neoliberal reforms or threatens
individual and commercial liberty, which it sometimes does, then democracy
ought to be sidestepped and replaced by the rule of experts or legal instruments
designed for that purpose. The practical implementation of neoliberal policies
will, therefore, lead to a relocation of power from political to economic
processes, from the state to markets and individuals, and finally from the
legislature and executives’ authorities to the judiciary.
(Thorsen Dag and Lie 2009)
Many scholars from a myriad of disciplines have underscored that neoliberalism not
only fabricates the system of free trade agreements, finance market speculations,
privatization and economic reforms but also constructs a new type of society with a
new value system based on the principles of the market. Harvey, in his book Brief
History of Neoliberalism, strongly argues that with the establishment of neoliberal
Introduction
5
market principles, we have moved away from a society marked by democratic governance to a new type of society in which the conditions for politics have been curtailed severely because of the conservative political reforms informed by neoliberal
thought and theories (Harvey 2005, 47). Belgian psychologist Paul Verhaeghe draws
significant connections between neoliberalism and psychosis and shows how the selfinterest incubated in such a society, claimed by neoliberalists to encourage innovation, simply serves to damage morality and reward psychopathy (Verhaeghe 2014).
Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman succinctly summarizes the paradox of freedom in
contemporary society: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless”
(Bauman 1988, 32). Bauman’s statement underlines that we are free to question religion, our society, our government, etc. because this kind of freedom is, indeed,
prompted by indifference.
In this new “liberal” environment, urban governance has been characterized by
redevelopment, urban expansion and real estate speculation. The implications of
these changes in the urban space have had exclusionary outcomes such as the
privatization of public spaces and changes in urban policy that systematically neglect
the needs of low-income residents. However, this is not to suggest that neoliberal
urban development is happening evenly everywhere. As Lisa Lowe contends:
“capitalism expands not through rendering all labor, resources, and markets across
the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying
particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for
exploitation and still others for disposal” (Lowe 2015, 150). Neoliberal urban
planning arguably divides the cities into functional parcels that are associated with
the different purposes essential for maintaining the capitalist and colonial divide in
terms of ethnic segregation, domestic reproduction, labor division and accumulation
of capital (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Smith 2002). Local residents, who have
grown up in the areas chosen for urban development, are displaced due to rising
rental prices, high costs of nearby facilities and an overall sense of being
unwelcome. Class privileges play a central role in the neoliberal spatial restructuring
that intensifies class and ethnic divides, which are reinforced through the intensive
movement of capital. For Brenner and Theodore, the neoliberal urban reforms paved
the way for the dialectically intertwined urban expansion that they termed “creative
destruction”:
… the (partial) destruction of extant institutional arrangements and political
compromises through market-oriented reform initiatives and the (tendential)
creation of a new infrastructure for market-oriented economic growth,
commodification and the rule of capital (emphasis by authors).
(Brenner and Theodore 2002, 362)
In other words, as neoliberal entities, the creative industries—while being
“creative”—are also “destructive.” The creative industries are part of the application
of neoliberal hegemony to arts and cultural policy, and as such, they cannot but
reproduce and endorse the exploitation and inequalities inherent in neoliberalism
(Hesmondhalgh 2008, 567). As Mike Davis has argued, “the middle class has finally
come downtown but only to bring suburbia with them. The hipsters think they’re
living in the real thing, but this is purely faux urbanism, a residential mall” (Davis
2016). Richard Florida’s popular work The Rise of the Creative Class explains how
Introduction
7
relations that operate through, and are intertwined with, the reproduction of capitalism in the settler landscape (Blomley 2004).
The heated analytical and political debates about gentrification and urban change,
that continue for almost 40 years, have often focused on the deepening class polarization of urban housing markets, with much less attention paid to the increasingly
sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist gentrification. Even less
attention has been paid to the role and political potential of art in urban resistance
and spatial justice movements. Since the 1980s, most social science research on art
and gentrification has concentrated on the integration of art into the market-oriented
urban policy and new urban planning to help boost the economic environment of
post-industrial cities, energize communities and neighborhoods and raise real estate
value.
When sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term “gentrification” in 1964, there
was no discussion about artists driving up real estate values in the United States
(Glass 1964). Glass observed that in inner London, “One by one, many of the
working-class quarters have been invaded by the middle class–upper and lower …
Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or
most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of
the district is changed” (Glass 1964, xvii). In 1979, Neil Smith contested this
understanding of gentrification and discussed that it is rather about the movement of
capital, not people. He regarded gentrification as the return of capital to these areas
that are productive for economic development. With his “rent gap” theory, Smith
also showed that there are many agents involved in gentrification, he wrote: “to
explain gentrification according to the gentrifier’s actions alone while ignoring the
role of builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real
estate agents and tenants is excessively narrow” (Smith 1979, 540). For Smith, the
rent gap occurs between the capitalized ground rent and the potential ground rent in
depreciated areas. He writes, “Gentrification occurs when the gap is wide enough that
developers can purchase shells cheaply, can pay the builders’ costs and profit for
rehabilitation, can pay interest on mortgage and construction loans, and can then sell
the end product for a sale price that leaves a satisfactory return to the developer”
(Smith 1979, 545). His thesis solidified the argument that “The so-called urban
renaissance has been stimulated more by economic than cultural forces”(Smith
1979, 540).
However, soon after in the early 1980s, studies emerged that linked gentrification to
the art establishments and artists. Sharon Zukin, in Loft Living: Culture and Capital in
Urban Change, published in 1980, found that most manufacturers would have stayed
in SoHo were it not for the law tweaks that allowed artists to create workspaces and
the tax breaks that incentivized the conversion of industrial spaces into residential ones
(Zukin 1987). Four years later, in a highly influential article titled “The Fine Art of
Gentrification,” Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan discussed how, in New York
City, when the art world moved into the Lower East Side, filled the freshly emptied
apartments and cleaned up the area, it began to transform into a hip and expensive
neighborhood (Deutsche and Ryan 1984). Since then many studies followed this argument and established a discourse on art and artists’ role as facilitators of gentrification (Cole 1987; Ley 2003; Mathews 2010; Rich 2019). A milestone in unraveling
8 Tijen Tunalı
the potential role of artists fueling gentrification was identifying them as “bridge
gentrifiers” (Zukin 1995, 111). The term attempts to communicate the lack of artists’
own actively intentional agency in facilitating gentrification. After the millennium, this
role has served as the most persistent argument, although some alternative media on
the internet continued to label the artists as gentrifiers. A stage-model type representation influences more recent research, which recognizes that artists are used by
governmental interventionist schemes to promote gentrification (Hackworth and Smith
2001). Other social science research has recognized a second-stage model, where capital follows the artists into gentrified neighborhoods to commodify their cultural assets. Another model shows that gentrified environments lead to growth in the arts
(Casellas, Dot and Pallares-Barbera 2012). Some of the later accounts chronicle artists
not as facilitators of gentrification but as displaces themselves (Lefebvre 2003). Finally,
the most recent study in the Urban Studies journal contests the artists’ role as facilitators of gentrification and argues instead that artists and the art establishment are
drawn to already gentrified or gentrifying neighborhoods (Foster, Grodach and
Murdoch 2018). There is a growing number of artists joining the anti-gentrification
resistance everywhere, but it is especially noticeable in large cities like New York,
Berlin, London, Barcelona, Istanbul and Delhi, which have been severely hit by the
negative effects of gentrification.
Arguably, the gentrified neighborhoods are suitable for art to test its role in the
urban space, which, on the one hand, reduces citizens to consumers and, on the other
hand, facilitates different social coexistences, autonomous networks, self-organized
mobilizations and empowered communities. How do art and artists partake in the
processes of gentrification and displacement? How does art resist gentrification rather
than “mask the violence of displacement” (Gittlitz 2015)? What could be effective
ways for artists to deal with their complicity in the production and marketing of the
city? How could artistic expressions in the urban space reveal, delimit, question and
resist the complexity of the urban crisis? What kind of political and aesthetic possibilities could emerge in the intersection of the spatial and dialogical premises of art
and the ideological and economic premise of new urban planning? What kind of
visual analysis method could be applied to discuss the visual impact of the
commercial, artistic, political and visual language of the gentrified neighborhoods?
The chapters in this book fulfill the need to reconceive innovatively, creatively and
scientifically of gentrified neighborhoods not only as arenas for urban politics but
also for aesthetic dispositive against those politics. They highlight the need for collaborative action to voice the unarticulated aspects of gentrification and challenge the
forced displacement of already marginalized groups.
The loss of public spaces, the exclusion of neighborhood residents from planning
decisions and the forced relocation of poorer residents due to rising rent and rundown buildings are not the only social issues of gentrification and displacement.
Neoliberal urban planning continues to divide cities into functional parcels that are
associated with the different purposes essential for maintaining the system in terms
of ethnic segregation, domestic reproduction, labor division and accumulation of
capital. Such strategic principles of urban organization, structures and symbolic
economies are made up of communicative signs and symbols reproducing the
dominant socio-political premises and preferable images of the city (Nas 2011).
Jacques Rancière’s theory of “distribution of the sensible” explains the ordering of
sensuous production as the aesthetic regime that creates the conditions to perceive,
Introduction
9
think and act in a given socio-historical situation. For Rancière, aesthetics is a means
of collectivism that forges the entire sensorium of a community by producing a world
of audible, visible, exchangeable, communicable, transformable objects, things and
experiences. In the configuration of that common social world, “the police (order)”
organizes and commands the distribution of space and time, occupations and capacities as a way to create consensus and social hierarchies that make up our perceived
social realities (Rancière 2010). Rancière calls this the “distribution of the sensible,”
and it is in the sensory fabric of the urban space; politics is aesthetics (Rancière 2004).
Neoliberalism, as a hegemonic politico-economic process, has also become a hegemonic consensus that has altered how we act and think about everything, everywhere.
For Harvey, it is the new common sense “taken for granted and beyond question”
(Harvey 2006, 145–146). Subversive aesthetic experience can affect the rational
perception of social practices and norms and make us aware of the obscured conditions and modalities of the social order (Armstrong 2000; Rancière 2004, 2010).
On this account, aesthetics also has the capacity to be an irresolvable force of disruption to the existing politico-aesthetic order. Art, as the arena of human creativity,
imagination and sensibility can propose, show and enact ways of being and acting as
political subjects by the way of such aesthetic properties. For Rancière, such politicization of ordinary citizens and their reclamation of the political space of visibility
and speech belonging to them paves the way for true democratic representation and
revolutionary politics.
Another Francophone philosopher Chantal Mouffe writes on the instrumentalization
of art by the contemporary hegemonic forces: “The aesthetic strategies of the counterculture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical
exigency are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode
of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist
period” (Mouffe 2005). Her work on the democratic public spaces contends: “What is
urgently needed is to foster the multiplication of agonistic public spaces where everything
that the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate can be brought to light and
challenged” (Mouffe 2005). Mouffe’s position about the role of art in the urban space is
close to that of Rancière. She recognizes art’s capacity to form and reform democratic
communities. She argues that “cultural and artistic practices could play an important role
in the agonistic struggle because they are a privileged terrain for the construction of new
subjectivities” (Mouffe 2005). Mouffe and Rancière ascribe to art a unique potential to
instigate a disruption in the existing sensory and discursive regime and to contest the
emergence of hegemonic consensus. The contributors in this book test the hypothesis that
the use of space or spatial forms and sense-making by inhabitants could change as a
result of the dialectical relation between the imposed spatial order and creative spatial
practices that connect places and people.
This volume presents many examples of art practices that fuse visual representation
with direct action against gentrification in attempts to contest the imposed value
order of neoliberal urbanism. The contributors extend the discussion of Henri
Lefebvre and David Harvey by purporting that art engagements have been proliferating to aid “the dispossessed to take back control of the city from which they
have for so long been excluded” (Harvey 1978). Urban space is a locus of social and
political resistance for “the right to the city”—a concept for urban struggles coined
by Lefebvre at the time of Parisian uprisings in 1968 (Lefebvre 1968). The urban
environment has always been considered a physical expression of social relations,
10 Tijen Tunalı
movements, and ideologies (Fainstein 2010; Harvey 1989). Therefore, changes to it
provide some insight into broader political reforms that could produce and reproduce
everyday urban life. Lefebvre considered the urban space a loaded ideological landscape that is socially produced (Lefebvre 1974). However, as Lefebvre’s descriptions
of space as a social product infer, the citadins are also producers and activators of the
urban space. To exercise the right to the city is to play an active role in shaping
urbanism and urban life (Lefebvre 1968). In Lefebvre’s discussions, cities are
increasingly shaped by global economic competition, local residents struggle to create
and protect spaces of heterotopia (Lefebvre 1968). Harvey, in Rebel Cities: From the
Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, explains this heterotopia:
Lefebvre’s concept of heterotopia (radically different from that of Foucault)
delineates liminal social spaces of possibility where “something different” is not
only possibility, but foundational for the defining of revolutionary trajectories.
This “something different” does not necessarily arise out of a conscious plan, but
more simply out of what people do, feel, sense and come to articulate as they seek
meaning in their daily lives. Such practices create heterotopic spaces all over the
place. We do not have to wait upon the grand revolution to constitute such
spaces.
(Harvey 2012, xvii)
The right to the city, then, is the right to reconstitute spaces of social and cultural
reproduction in the city and is linked to struggles against neoliberal urbanism with
reference to claims of the right to housing, education, health, culture, inclusion,
participation and so forth. This “cry and demand” for the city, in the words of
Marcuse, “is for the material necessities of life, the aspiration is for a broader right to
what is necessary beyond the material to lead a satisfying life” (Marcuse 2012, 31).
Harvey notes that “our political task, Lefebvre suggests, is to imagine and reconstitute a totally different kind of city out of the disgusting mess of a globalizing,
urbanizing capital run amok” (Harvey 2012, xvi).
Many contemporary studies on the link between urbanism and neoliberalism
have followed Lefebvre’s vision of “right to the city” from radical viewpoints. For
example, shouldering Lefebvre’s legacy, Edward Soja views neoliberal urban policies
as the spatialization of neoliberalism with mounting social and spatial injustices (Soja
1996, 2010). His spatial critique and conceptualization of “spatial justice” solidifies
the discussions that while capitalism commodifies spaces of daily life, it is confronted
with constant dissidence outside the institutional political channels in everyday urban
spaces. Harvey stresses that, at the heart of the spatial justice and other urban
struggles, there is one collective aim: “their right to change the world, to change life
and to reinvent the city more after their heart’s desire” (Harvey 2003, 25). The social
consciousness of such a right is connected to the desire for self-determination in daily
social relations in the city. It is thus plausible to state that such desire mobilizes
people in the urban spaces because it corroborates the common right for the urban
public space and the right to decide how to use that public space commonly. Desire to
have power over the daily life in a city is an emancipating desire, hence often against
immense efforts by the neoliberal reproduction of desire.
The urban sensory environments must be seductive and pleasant so that the desire
for consumption can be encouraged. The book opens with Luke Caroll’s chapter in
Introduction
11
which urban space is regarded as a setting for capitalist desires and life experiences.
Drawing from critical theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxist theories of aesthetics,
Caroll offers insights into an overlooked question inspired by the Frankfurt School,
especially Walter Benjamin. He suggests that the aesthetics of the gentrified spaces
and the “desirable” aesthetic sensibilities of gentrifiers are indicative of the form
taken by alienation under contemporary capitalism. This theory provides insight into
how gentrification is connected to a certain capitalist “desire” and its contemporary
urban aesthetics. Caroll’s theorization of capitalist desire and gentrification offers a
qualified framework and vocabulary to the discussions, especially generated by the
discussions of the production of space disguising the social relations contained in
common spaces. By highlighting the centrality of desire to gentrification, Caroll’s
chapter creatively ignites discussions on the capitalist fetishization of the urban space
and inspires new ways to combat gentrification through the reconstitution of desire
rather than moralistic critique.
The first part of the book continues with the discussion of how the neoliberal
aestheticization of urban space both conceals and reveals important cultural contradictions in the neoliberal city. The following two case studies in Oakland and
Marseille discuss the neoliberal motivations for using aesthetics as a strategy toward
social exclusion and the management of the class and other social identities at the
expense of growing cultural reification. Robin Balliger’s chapter analyzes the characterization of artists as “pioneer gentrifiers” in the gentrification literature through
longitudinal ethnographic research, particularly by shifting the debate from the artist
as a signifier to the embodied individual with neighborhood relationships that
span many years. Balliger contrasts the everyday lives of artists in a neighborhood
with arts-led revitalization strategies in Oakland’s Uptown District—one of the most
extensive urban “restorations” in Californian history. Her research is especially
significant in showing how the myopic discourse on artists as gentrifiers damages
solidarity among artists and other low-income populations.
Since the end of the 1990s, a number of the urban elite has been using creativity as a
new urban planning tool to rehabilitate some disadvantaged neighborhoods. For a
decade, Marseille, the second-largest city in France, has been redesigned radically and
the connections between arts, culture and neoliberalism are increasingly visible.
According to Mathilde Vignau and Alexandre Grondeau, two main tendencies exist the
reinforcement of gentrification and urban neoliberalism through arts and culture and
the permanence of creative resistance movements opposed to the drift of capitalism.
Vignau and Grondeau’s long-lasting research project focuses on four distinctive
neighborhoods located close to the city center of Marseille—places where arts and
culture have been used to quickly transform city landscapes or functions since the city
gained the European Capital of Culture label. The researchers discuss how in Marseille,
and more particularly in La Joliette and Le Vieux-Port, the aesthetic dimension of art,
culture and creativity has radically redefined the city center landscape and how that
change occurs vis-à-vis neoliberalism. Vignau and Grondeau then analyze the antigentrification resistance movements in the form of graffiti, stickers, hip-hop music and
alternative movies. They discuss that, especially the case of La Plaine neighborhood
shows how those initiatives can serve sociopolitical protests engaged in by users and
artists who fear the potential gentrification of the whole neighborhood.
The new forms of agency and strategy of urban creativity in the form of graffiti, wall
paintings, yarn bombings, stickers, urban gardening, street performances, tactical art,
12 Tijen Tunalı
creative campaigns and theatrical actions—among others—demand active spectatorship
and have a growing power to renegotiate space toward new forms of political participation. The second chapter highlights the diverse voices of the artists and tactics of resistance to the process of gentrification. Susana Jimenez Carmona analyzes the work of
Ultra-Red, a recognized group of sound artists and activists with more than 20 members
spread out between Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and the UK. The group understands
listening as a political action that always implies a relationship with others and with the
environment. Since 1997, they have collaborated with the community members in Union
de Vecinos during the mobilizations of Pico Also to defend social housing and confront
the problem of gentrification. This example provides a critical approach to Ultra-Red’s
controversy and the positions of the different parties involved in complicated relations
between art and gentrification at present (Ultra-red, art galleries, some art critics and
neighborhood associations).
Marie Pierre Vincent’s case regards Ridley Road market, a daily retail market famous for its fusion of Afro-Caribbean, Asian and European goods, which has recently
been severely altered by gentrification. Vincent analyzes two separate artistic projects
documenting the market and the resistance to gentrification: Lucinda Rogers’ past
exhibition of paintings, On Gentrification, displayed at the House of Illustration
gallery (King’s Cross) and Donna Travis’ photographic work in progress, Dalston
Stories, to be displayed this year in two separate galleries (a local gallery and a trendy
one in gentrified Shoreditch). By analyzing the diversity of the artistic creations
(ranging from visual to textual productions) and the impact of these works (through
semi-structured interviews), Vincent examines the extent to which a new form
of covert and disguised activism is produced. She further addresses the role and
limitations of these white, middle-class, female artists using art both as a tool for
reflection and a catalyst for resistance.
Rabea Berfelde’s chapter examines the occupation of Berlin’s Volksbühne—a
public theater with a history of radical cultural production—to consider the “right to
the creative city” in times marked by the increasing financialization of the economy
and its intimate link to urban real-estate speculation. Berfelde revisits the critique of
the “creative city” paradigm that has been thriving in human geography debates over
the last years. Her case study about Volksbühne’s occupation by the artists’ collective
from Dust to Glitter demonstrates the contestations between “culturalization from
below” through city dwellers and autonomous cultural scenes and “culturalization
from above” through governmental bodies. Berfelde contributes to the discussion of
the creative reproduction of urban space by arguing that the form of “communing”
the artist-activists practiced during the occupation indicated an alternative understanding of the creative production of urban space.
From an urban planning perspective, the capacity to involve diverse groups in
participatory planning processes is useful to foster integration and consensus on
public goals. Therefore, the integration of public, private, and civic actors in the
process of community building is highly desirable for urban planners trying to
advocate the effectiveness of policies and projects. However, there is also the other
side of the coin: more and more urban communities and neighborhood organizations
enact active resistance against gentrification. The neoliberal restructuring also results
in a new social and urban order through which urban inhabitants reimagine and
reinvent their role. This provides fertile ground to produce new subjectivities both
integrating and resisting the ideas of the neoliberal city. The third part of the book
Introduction
13
delves into the discussion of active citizenship and neighborhood resistance shaped by
the complexities of people’s lives, needs and desires, creating times and “spaces of
collective lives.” The interdisciplinary team at the University of St. Thomas, led by art
history professors Todd Lawrence, Paul Lorah and Heather Shirey, combine insights
from art history, ethnographic research and spatial analysis, examining the potential
of street art to activate community identity, and of sanctioned and unsanctioned art
as a response to gentrification in the Midway neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota.
The researchers show that recent economic development in an affordable area of
working-class homes has instigated a greater instability in this neighborhood with
growing racial and ethnic diversity. They discuss how, since the beginnings of gentrification, the Midway neighborhood has become a key site for counterhegemonic
artistic expression and resistance.
Gentrification is often discussed as a form of new-age colonialization both in
academic and activist circles. For Liza Kim Jackson, gentrification is a strategy of the
ongoing colonial relations—both symbolic and material—that gives rise to the settler
city and persists as a method of disciplining the poor and indigenous bodies, spaces
and lands through the capitalist way of life (Jackson 2017). Such discussions are
valuable as they lead to broader political questions about socio-environmental and
cultural life in the cities. Most gentrification theory has addressed the how, why
and who of gentrification, but often ignored the indigenous production of public and
cultural space. Michelle Veitch’s chapter focuses on the indigenous art Hotel
Skwachàys Lodge on the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. She discusses
how the relocation schemes further promote frontier and colonial discourses by establishing East Hastings, an economically depressed city district facing pressures of
cultural urban redevelopment. Veitch shows that the artists Fred and Whitehead respatialize and re-historicize the hotel with their images and texts that incorporate
heraldic crest art, oral traditions and ceremonial practices to decolonize such discourses. Integrating murals, poetic writings and woodcarvings into their room designs at Skwachàys Lodge, Veitch discusses how the artists engage in aesthetic
resistance by redressing trans-indigenous cultural inheritances, ancestral genealogies,
knowledge systems and clan lineages.
The book concludes by conceptualizing gentrified neighborhoods not only as
arenas for urban politics but also as settings for aesthetic resistance against those
politics. Panos Leventis engages in one such story in the work of Astraki Strikes, a
street artist working in the heart of Nicosia by analyzing her ongoing project
“Mapping the Old City,” which has engaged an entire district of the Walled City of
Cyprus since 2014. Leventis interprets this project as a community-building agent,
one that resists the dominant socio-urban forces of redevelopment and instead
showcases, celebrates and empowers unseen urban heroes of Nicosia—those who
have stayed loyal to the city through decades of conflict and reconciliation, abandonment and social re-engagement.
This book points to major shifts in our understanding of urban transformation in
the changing neoliberal landscape and the role of art in it. Considering art as a crucial
tool for new and agonistic forms of political engagement in the gentrified urban space
is a novel critical approach to both the aesthetics of politics and urban space theory.
The understanding of this capacity of urban artists and art is valuable not only to the
field of the arts and visual studies but also to sociology, human geography, urban
studies and urban planning.
14 Tijen Tunalı
References
Abaza, Mona. 2016. “The Field of Graffiti and Street Art in Post-January 2011 Egypt.” In
Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, ed. J.I. Ross, 318–334. London: Routledge.
Annunziata, Sandra, and Clara Rivas-Alonso. 2018. “Resistances to Gentrification and
Displacement.” In Handbook of Gentrification Studies, ed. Loretta Lees and Martin Phillips,
pp: 393–412. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Armstrong, Isobel. 2000. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1988. Freedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship.
London and New York: Verso Books.
Blomley, Nicholas. 2004. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New
York: Routledge.
Brenner, Neil, Peter Marcuse, and Mayer Margit. 2012. Cities for People, Not For Profit:
Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. London: Routledge.
Brenner, Neil, and Nik Theodore. 2002. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing
Neoliberalism.’” Antipode 34 (5): 349–379.
Burton, Johanna, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon, eds. 2016. Public Servants: Art
and the Crisis of the Common Good. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cameron, Stuart, and Jon Coaffee. 2005. “Art, Gentrification and Regeneration—From Artist
as Pioneer to Public Arts.” European Journal of Housing Policy 5 (1): 39–58.
Casellas, Antonia, Jutgla Esteve Dot, and Montserrat Pallares-Barbera 2012. “Artists, Cultural
Gentrification and Public Policy.” Urbani Izziv Urban Challenge 23 (1): S104–S114.
Cole, David B. 1987. “Artists and Urban Redevelopment.” Geographical Review 77 (4):
391–407.
Danewid, Ida. 2019. “The Fire This Time: Grenfell, Racial Capitalism and the Urbanisation of
Empire.” European Journal of International Relations 26 (1): 289–313.
Davis, Mike. 1993. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Engels, F. [1845].
Davis, Mike. 2016. “A Boom Interview: Mike Davis in Conversation with Jennifer Wolch and
Dana Cuff.” Boom California. https://boomcalifornia.com/2016/12/29/a-boom-interviewin-conversation-with-jennifer-wolch-and-dana-cuff/.
DETR. 1999. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions: Towards an Urban
Renaissance: Sharing the Vision. http://www.regeneration.detr.gov.uk/urbanren/1.html.
De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1998. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Deutsche, Rosalyn, and C.G. Ryan. 1984. “The Fine Art of Gentrification.” October 31,
91–111.
Dicks, Bella. 2004. Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability.
Berkshire: Open University Press.
Fainstein, Susan, and David Gladstone. 1997. Tourism and Urban Transformation:
Interpretation of Urban Tourism.” In Cities in Transformation--Transformation in Cities,
ed. Ove Källtorp, I. Elander, O. Ericsson, and M. Franzén, 119–135. Aldershot, Hans, UK:
Avebury.
Fainstein, Susan S. 2010. The Just City. Ithaca: Cornel University Press.
Fawaz, Mona. 2009. “Neoliberal Urbanity and the Right to the City: A View from Beirut’s
Periphery.” Development and Change 40 (5): 827–852.
Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.
Foster, Nicole, Carl Grodach, and James Murdoch. 2018. “Gentrification, Displacement and
the Arts: Untangling the Relationship between Arts Industries and Place Change.” Urban
Studies 55 (4): 96–118.
Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Introduction
15
Friedman, Milton, and Friedman Rose. 1980. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Gittlitz, A.M. 2015. Evicted Utopias. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/evicted-utopias/.
Glass, Ruth. 1964. “Introduction: Aspects of Change.” In London: Aspects of Change, ed.
Centre for Urban Studies, xiii–xlii. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
Guinard, P., Margier, A. 2018. “Art as a New Urban Norm: Between Normalization of the
City through Art and Normalization of Art through the City in Montreal and
Johannesburg.” Cities 77, 13–20.
Hackworth, Jason, and Neil Smith. 2001. “The Changing State of Gentrification.” Tijdshcrift
voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 22: 464–477.
Hancox, Dan. 2016. “Gentrification X: How an Academic Argument Became the People’s
Protest.” http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/12/gentrification-argument-protestbacklash-urban-generation-displacement.
Harvey, David. 1978. “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis.”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2 (3): 101–131.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Harvey, David. 2006. “Neo-Liberalism as Creative Destruction.” Geografiska Annaler. Series
B, Human Geography 88 (2): 145–158.
Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
London: Verso.
Hayek, Friedrich. 1994. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hesmondhalgh, David J. 2008. “Cultural and Creative Industries.” In The SAGE Handbook
of Cultural Analysis, ed. J. Frow and T. Bennett, 553–569. London: SAGE.
Irazábal, Clara, ed. 2008. “Citizenship, Democracy and Public Space in Latin America.” In
Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events: Citizenship, Democracy and Public Space in Latin
America, 11–34. New York: Routledge.
Jackson, Liza K. 2017. “The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and
Marxist Geography.” Journal of Law and Social Policy 27: 43–71.
Kohn, Margaret. 2016. The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lees, Loretta. 2000. “A Reappraisal of Gentrification: Towards a Geography of
Gentrification.” Progress in Human Geography 24 (3): 389–408.
Lees, Loretta, Just Space and SNAG. 2014. Staying Put: An Anti-Gentrification Handbook for
Council Estates in London. London: Antipode Foundation.
Lees Loretta, Tom Slater, and Elvin K Wyly. 2010. The Gentrification Reader. New York:
Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2000. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch.
London: Athlone.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Ley, David. 1996. The New Middle Classes and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ley, David. 2003. “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40
(12): 2527–2544.
Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. 2006. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge.
16 Tijen Tunalı
Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marcuse, Peter. 2012. “Whose Right(s) to What City?” In Cities for People, Not For Profit, ed.
N. Brenner, P. Marcuse, M. Mayer, 24–41. London: Routledge.
Markin, Pablo B. 2013. “The Growing Aestheticization of Society, Culture, and Everyday Life.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296637920_The_Growing_Aestheticization_of_
Society_Culture_and_Everyday_Life.
Markusen, Ann, and Greg Schrock. 2006. “The Artistic Dividend: Urban Specialization and
Economic Development Implications.” Urban Studies 43 (10): 1661–1686.
Mathews, Vanessa. 2010. “Aestheticizing Space: Art, Gentrification and the City.” Geography
Compass 6 (4): 660–675.
Mayer, Margit. 2009. “The ‘Right to the City’ in the Context of Shifting Mottos of Urban
Social Movements.” City 13 (2–3): 362–363.
McMurtry, John. 1998. Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. West
Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press.
Merrifield, Andy. 2014. The New Urban Question. London: Pluto Press.
Miles, Malcolm. 1997. Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Features. London, New
York: Routledge.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art & Research: A Journal
of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 (2). http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. “Which Public Space for Critical Artistic Practices.” In Cork Caucus:
On Art, Possibility and Democracy, ed. Shep Steiner and Trevor Joyce. Ireland: National
Sculpture Factory.
Nas, Peter J., ed. 2011. Cities Full of Symbols: A Theory of Urban Space and Culture. AUP:
Leiden University Press.
Pinder, David. 2015 [2013]. “Reconstituting the Possible: Lefebvre, Utopia and the Urban
Question.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39 (1): 28–45.
Purcell, Mark. 2004. “Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist
World Order.” International Journal 27 (3): 564–590.
Purcell, Mark. 2008. Recapturing Democracy Neoliberalization and the Struggle for
Alternative Urban Futures. New York, NY: Routledge.
Ramirez-Blanco, Julia. 2018. Artistic Utopias of Revolt: Claremont Road, Reclaim the Streets,
and the City of Sol. London; New York, NY: Palgrave.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London
and New York: Continuum.
Rancière, Jacques. 2010. “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes.” In The Sublime, ed.
Simon Morley, 67–69. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rich, Meghan A. 2019. “Artists Are a Tool for Gentrification: Maintaining Artists and
Creative Production in Art Districts.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 25 (6):
727–742.
Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Slater, Tom. 2009. “Missing Marcuse: On Gentrification and Displacement.” City 13 (2):
292–311.
Smith, Neil. 1979. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by
Capital, Not People.” Journal of the American Planning Association 45 (4): 538–548.
Smith, Neil. 1982. “Gentrification and Uneven Development.” Economic Geography 58 (2):
139–155.
Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London
and New York: Routledge.
Smith, Neil. 2002. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban
Strategy.” Antipode 34 (3): 427–450.
Introduction
17
Smith, Neil. 2007. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by
Capital, not People.” Journal of the American Planning Association 45 (4): 538–548.
Smyth, Hedley. 1994. Marketing the City: The Role of Flagship Developments in Urban
Regeneration. London: E & F. N. Spoon.
Soja, Edward. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Thorsen Dag, Einar, and Amund
Lie. 2009. “The Neoliberal Challenge: What Is
Neoliberalism?” http://folk.uio.no/daget/neoliberalism2.pdf.
Tonkiss, Fran. 2005. Space, City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms.
Oxford: Polity Press.
Tsilimpounidi, Myrto. 2015. “If These Walls Could Talk: Street Art and Urban Belonging in
the Athens of Crisis.” Laboratorium 7 (2): 71–91.
Tunalı, Tijen. 2018. “The Art of Resistance: Carnival Aesthetics and the Gezi Street Protests.”
ASAP: Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 3 (2): 377–399.
Verhaeghe, Paul. 2014. What about Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society.
London: Scribe.
Zukin, Sharon. 1987. “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core.” Annual Review
of Sociology 13: 129–147.
Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell.